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Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025
Shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025
The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems' world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf's touch to the rat's tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O'Malley's animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils.
In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the 'The Ballad of Googletown' – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online and social interaction is unnecessary:
The cars are in the drive
And the bees are in the hive
They say the kids are safe inside
In Googletown
This new book promises, as Joseph O'Connor has written, all those things 'we go to Mary O'Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty of plain words placed in careful order, carefully – and always, the bliss of musicality.'
'The Shark Nursery brings a fine lyric sensibility to subjects as diverse as Greek mythology, marine biology and the time/space continuum. ... Other poems push all the way into a lyrical surrealism rare in Irish poetry, harnessing metaphor's capacity to rough up our sense of the world as fixed and predictable.'
Vona Groarke, The Irish Times
'There are many memorable poems in The Shark Nursery, a book that speaks eloquently to our place in the natural world as well as to the challenges posed by the current political landscape. Overall, it is a rich and stimulating collection that cements O'Malley's reputation as one of Ireland's most important contemporary poets.
Tim Murphy, The Friday Poem
'The Shark Nursery is a one-of-a-kind book, filled with achingly beautiful poems that show a true artist at her absolute peak.'
Seán Kelly, Irish Examiner
About the Author
Mary O'Malley was born in Connemara, Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for 8 years and taught at Universidade Nova. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and the Committee of the Cúirt International Poetry Festival. She taught the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at NUI Galway, held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013, and held Residencies in Paris, Tarragona, New York, NUI Galway, and Derry, Belfast. She is deeply committed to education and the preservation of marine life and culture and is active in environmental education. She is a member of Aosdána and has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer's Fellowship and the 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. She was the Trinity Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre for 2019.
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